http://www.salon.com/news/politics/barack_obama/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/10/27/gene_lyons_believe_the_factsYou've heard the lies, now believe the facts
The list of public misconceptions about Obama is long and politically crippling
By Gene Lyons
"Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects." -- Will Rogers
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"The dirty little secret," writes Washington Post financial columnist Steven Pearlstein, "is that most Americans don't really know what they think about the issues that so animate the political conversation in Washington, and what they think they know about them is often wrong."
The list of public misconceptions is long and politically crippling. Maybe the single most damaging is that the Obama administration has brought about an epidemic of government spending, tripling the yearly budget deficit and vastly increasing the national debt.
Never happened. History records that President George W. Bush, who inherited a $236 billion government surplus from the Clinton administration in 2001, handed President Obama a stacked deck eight years later.
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People have heard Republicans say "the failed stimulus" so often that many believe it. Again, according to the CBO, the (clearly inadequate) American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan resulted in approximately 3 million jobs, the difference between a lingering recession and a full-blown depression, most economists would say.
Also, many people swear Obama raised their taxes. Actually, he cut them. Almost one-third of the stimulus consisted of tax cuts, not spending. But because the money reached people in small increments through decreased withholding, most don't know it.
And, no, it wasn't the Obama administration that bailed out Wall Street. The Bush administration enacted TARP in October 2008, although most Democrats (Obama included) voted for it. We'd all like to see more high-flying Wall Street fraudsters locked up, but TARP did succeed in saving the financial system while paying for itself.
Ditto the auto industry bailouts, an unfortunate necessity also first initiated by the Bush administration that's basically worked. Do you really think Americans would be better off without General Motors?
No, you don't.
Even so, "Things could have been much worse" isn't much of a campaign slogan. Moreover, Obama has only himself to blame for the oddly diffident way he's gone about explaining himself.
Far from being a condescending elitist, the president has tended to give voters a lot more credit than they deserve.
Hence many of the same dreamers who convinced themselves that the merry-go-round of constantly rising real estate values would help them borrow their way to prosperity now trust that the simplistic nostrums of the Tea Party will lead us safely past Big Rock Candy Mountain and all the way back to Leave It to Beaver-Land. * Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. More Gene Lyons
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